Harris, Trump barnstorm battlegrounds seeking to break deadlock

US Vice President Kamala Harris begins a swing through multiple battleground states including Michigan and Pennsylvania in the home stretch of the election – Copyright AFP Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo

Jim Watson, with Michael Mathes in Washington

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are battling for holdout votes on a penultimate weekend of campaigning across US swing states, with Michelle Obama joining the Democrat onstage before the Republican nominee hosts an eyebrow-raising rally in New York City.

With just 10 days left in a bitterly contested presidential race, the rivals converge Saturday on Michigan, one of the three fiercely-contested “Blue Wall” states — along with Wisconsin and top battleground prize Pennsylvania — that Democrats see as critical to any path to Election Day victory on November 5.

Polls show a dead heat in the race’s final days, and with more than 35 million people nationwide already casting early ballots, Americans are deciding whether to elect the country’s first-ever woman president, or its oldest commander in chief.

Part of Harris’s strategy is to peel moderate Republicans away from an increasingly vituperative Trump, who continues to demean certain Americans as the “enemy.” 

On Friday he warned that if he wins the White House, people who committed election fraud “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences.”

For Republican A.D. Jefferson, a 62-year-old laborer attending Harris’s rally in Houston, the Trump turmoil is too much.

“I just think she’s less controversial,” he told AFP. “I’m a Republican, but I feel like Trump is just too chaotic for me.”

Fresh off a high-energy rally in Texas with pop icon Beyonce to highlight Republican restrictions on abortion, Harris heads to Kalamazoo, Michigan where she will court voters by drawing on yet more starpower, this time deploying one of the Democratic Party’s most popular emissaries: former first lady Michelle Obama.

Her husband Barack Obama joined Harris on Thursday for a rally in Georgia.

Harris, 60, rallies Sunday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the largest city in the largest of the swing states likely to determine the outcome of the presidential election under the US electoral system.

Trump, who swept the three Blue Wall states in his shock victory in 2016 only to see Joe Biden reclaim them for Democrats four years later, is strategizing that clawing back one or more of the trio and winning the other so-called Sun Belt swing states would propel him back into the White House.

With just a few thousands votes possibly the difference between victory and defeat in the tightest of swing states, Trump holds rallies Saturday in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where a robust ground game and relentless barnstorming of the battlegrounds could prove decisive.

They follow the release late Friday of the extended, three-hour interview that Trump taped for the Joe Rogan Experience, America’s most popular podcast. 

He is seeking to woo Rogan’s massive, largely male audience, as the Republican candidate hunts for viral moments that tap into his everyman appeal.

– ‘Like the 1930s’ –

Then on Sunday night, Trump performs a campaign quirk: rallying his supporters in Madison Square Garden, the iconic arena in the heart of Democrat-heavy New York.

Analysts have pondered why Trump is campaigning in his native New York despite virtually no chance of flipping the state. The brash billionaire and onetime reality television star may be keen to orchestrate a spectacle and demonstrate he can fill an arena in a Democratic bastion.

But critics, including Trump’s 2016 rival Hillary Clinton, have noted that Madison Square Garden was also the scene of a 1939 pro-Nazi rally organized by a group supportive of Adolf Hitler.

“She said it’s just like the 1930s,” Trump said at a Friday rally in Michigan, referring to Clinton’s remarks a day earlier on CNN. “No it’s not, no. This is called ‘Make America Great Again.’”

The weekend campaigning follows a heated row over accusations that the Republican ex-president has been running to be an authoritarian leader, following claims by Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, echoed by Harris, that Trump is a “fascist” who cannot be trusted with power again.